


Above and Beyond

by Kacka



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, References to Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 15:05:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5932716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kacka/pseuds/Kacka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke thought the hardest part of being a home care nurse would be spending time with terminal patients, not dealing with their overbearing loved ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Above and Beyond

Clarke didn’t expect this job to be easy by any stretch of the imagination. She’d done her time in clinical rotations, gotten her CNA and as much experience as she could at the university hospital, but this job wasn’t like the other ones she’d had. At this job, there was nobody watching her, nobody making sure she was doing right by her patient.

Or so she’d thought.

In reality, her patient’s son was almost always present, working on his graduate thesis from home and not letting Clarke do half of what officially fell under her job description.

Clarke had memorized the information her agency had given her about Aurora Blake: mid-forties, recently retired from a shop specializing in formal dress alterations because she has a degenerative muscular condition (likely ALS) and can’t work anymore. One son (twenty seven) and one daughter (eleven).

Aurora’s son, Bellamy, had been the one to hire a home care nurse for twice a week. Even though he’s paying for Clarke to come, she’s noticed that he has trouble with boundaries. Namely, he doesn’t seem to think Clarke is capable of caring properly for his mother. It’s starting to get under Clarke’s skin.

“This is literally my job, Bellamy,” Clarke huffs, waiting outside the bathroom to let Aurora preserve some of her last shreds of dignity.

“You’re all of, what? Five foot two?”

“I’m five, five.”

“Right,” he scoffs, looking her up and down. “Like you could even lift my mom from her chair onto the scooter, much less from the scooter to the toilet.”

His arms are crossed impressively over his chest and he’s standing close enough she could possibly be intimidated, but he’s not, in reality, all that much taller than she is. Bigger, sure. Stronger, absolutely. But Clarke thinks she’s strong _enough_ for the job.

“I could do it.” Clarke isn’t sure, namely because Bellamy hasn’t let her try yet, but she’s ninety percent convinced she could lift Aurora. The woman isn’t eating much these days, and has gotten pretty light. “Just like I can help her eat and make her do her physical therapy without you breathing down my neck all the time. You’re paying me to be here, you get that, right?”

“Of course I do. I just want to make sure I’m getting what I’m paying for.”

“You’re not if you don’t let me work.”

Just then Aurora calls out from the bathroom and Bellamy clenches his jaw but stands back to let Clarke pass. He hovers in the doorway, ready to step in if it looks like Clarke is going to drop his mom, but she’s thankful that he isn’t necessary. As much as he’s been around these first few days, she knows he’s just helping her get settled before he goes to work on those days so he can afford to pay for Clarke’s services.

The next week, he’s dressed to go to work when she arrives. He’s got some job at a bank, and he’s making three PB&Js when Clarke drops her coat off in the kitchen.

“Planning to be hungry?” She asks, amused as he whizzes past her to grab a bag of pretzels from the pantry and starts dumping them into two plastic baggies.

“Cute,” he deadpans before calling up the stairs, “O, let’s go! We’re going to be late!”

Clarke is dying to meet Octavia, who has been at school or at an after school program when Clarke has been there previously, but she can feel Bellamy’s expectant gaze and so she knocks on Aurora’s bedroom door and lets herself inside to help her patient dress.

A bright-eyed fifth grader bounces in to kiss her mom on the cheek before she goes to school, and though Aurora’s speech is pretty hard to make out, the love in her eyes is clearly there.

“Are you the nurse?” Octavia asks, sizing Clarke up.

“That’s me. My name is Clarke.”

“Okay.” She sounds dubious, but Bellamy calls for her again and she’s gone before she can say anything else.

The weeks pass mostly without incident. Bellamy makes Aurora’s lunch in the morning, though Clarke has tried to talk him into just leaving the ingredients for her to put together. Clarke helps Aurora get dressed, and then settles the woman into her armchair where she can watch Wheel of Fortune and listen to books on tape. Bellamy has checked out a whole stack for her from the library, and Clarke laughs to herself when she pictures the grumpy man pick out romances when his own bookshelf is full of historical nonfiction and biographies.

Clarke helps Aurora eat (when Aurora is in a good enough mood to let her) and gets abashedly enthralled in the books. Bellamy comes home early from work one afternoon to find Clarke patiently discussing one of the plot points with Aurora. It takes a lot of effort for her to get out a slurred sentence, and she often gets frustrated with herself halfway through and starts tearing up.

“Don’t tell me you’re getting sucked into these books too,” he teases Clarke. He’s in a good mood today, kneeling by the arm of Aurora’s chair to wait until she’s done speaking before he interjects.

“It was inevitable,” Clarke sighs, sweeping Aurora’s used tissues into a wastebasket and taking it into the kitchen to give them some privacy.

Bellamy usually doesn’t get home until after Octavia does, working late and long shifts, and then running errands while Clarke is on the clock. It occurs to her one day that the bus is wheelchair accessible, and that she could take Aurora shopping to lighten some of Bellamy’s load. She knows how antsy Aurora gets, just being in the same room all day, and she thinks it would do mother and son both some good.

Unsurprisingly, Bellamy resists the idea.

“What if something happens?” He demands.

“What’s going to happen?” Clarke makes her whisper as fierce as she can. She wanted to broach the subject with Bellamy before Aurora just in case he said no, so she didn’t get the woman’s hopes up.

“I don’t know,” he says, running a hand over the back of his head. “What if you need to reach something on the top shelf?” He smirks.

“Would you stop? I am not that short,” she says, hitting his arm and trying not to think about how solid he is. “If it will make you feel better, I can come over this weekend, free of charge, and the four of us can go on a test run.”

“You don’t mind?” He says, doubtful.

“What else have I got to do?”

They end up going just a few stops down, to the grocery store. Clarke is confident she and Aurora can handle it on their own in the future, but it does relieve some of her own worries to have Bellamy there the first time. Octavia is excited to ride the bus, sitting next to Aurora and swinging her feet as she chatters away. She’s used to riding in the backseat of Bellamy’s car, but that’s not equipped for Aurora’s needs and he’d have it with him at work, anyway.

Bellamy and Clarke stand back and watch.

“How do you think she’s doing?” He asks in a low voice.

“Medically? You know how she’s doing. Emotionally… She’s definitely better when you and Octavia are around. She’s pretty angry, in general, but when you guys are nearby I think she lets go of a lot of that bitterness.”

“This can’t be an easy job.” She wasn’t expecting him to take the conversation in a direction anywhere near her life and she looks up at him in surprise. His eyes are burning and she looks away quickly.

“It’s not.”

He lets the conversation fizzle, for which Clarke is grateful. Clarke’s other patient, whom she sees four times a week, is a girl with cerebral palsy named Charlotte. She’s around Octavia’s age, and deeply troubled. Clarke is good at her job, knows that she’s helping no matter how hard it is for her emotionally, but calling it ‘hard’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.

The grocery shopping goes very well.

Octavia, who never gets to go along with Bellamy, is thrilled to get to pick out some exciting snacks for herself. She even wheedles her way into getting cereal that is eighty percent marshmallows, and Clarke loves every minute of Bellamy trying to resist his sister’s puppy dog eyes.

“You just got played,” she observes as she tries to follow Aurora’s pointing to figure out what she’s asking for.

“I know, I know. It’s not the first time. Wait, is that all you’re getting?” Bellamy asks, peering into Clarke’s basket. So far it only contains a bag of baby carrots and some microwaveable dinners.

“I’ll probably pick up a frozen pizza,” she shrugs. He gives her a deeply scandalized look. “What?”

“Clarke, you don’t have any ingredients. Nothing in your basket amounts to a real meal. Please don’t tell me this is what you live off of.”

“I don’t have time to cook!”

“Not even on weekends? You do know _how_ to cook, right?”

“I can make rice. And eggs. And salads, salads are my specialty.”

He just shakes his head.

“Okay, after this you’re coming home with us and I’m going to teach you some easy skills,” he tells her, grabbing a few items from the shelf in front of them and dropping them in her basket.

“I am?”

“You said yourself you don’t have anything else going on,” he reminds her, his freckles taking on a barely detectable pink hue. It’s oddly endearing. “Don’t try to backtrack now just to save face.”

“I would never.”

“Good. Octavia, go pick Clarke out some peppers.”

When they get back to the Blakes’ house, Clarke goes to help Aurora get situated in the living room but her patient waves her away, protesting that she wants to be in the kitchen where the action is. Bellamy dutifully moves the kitchen table away from the wall so that Aurora can pull her scooter right up to it.

Clarke expects him to teach her how to make a specific dish, but instead she learns techniques. He shows her how to saute vegetables, what to do if her dish is too dry, and what different spices do. Octavia jumps in on the part of the lesson where he’s going over different chopping techniques. He gives Clarke more constructive criticism than the eleven-year-old, but she can’t deny that he’s showing a patient, sweet side of himself that she’d never expected to see when they first met.

She stays long enough that the cooking lesson turns into a family dinner, which Clarke hasn’t ever really experienced outside of major holidays. Clarke’s parents took turns working nights when she was growing up, and neither of them had much aptitude for cooking. But as Octavia chatters about some samurai movie she watched at a friend’s house recently, with Bellamy on Clarke’s left and Aurora on her right, she feels a pang of regret that she’d never had this.

Clarke and Aurora start to take more outings together during the day, taking the bus to buy groceries from a list Bellamy has left or picking Octavia up some school supplies. Once they even take a trip to the hardware store to get materials for framing and hanging Octavia’s artwork. She and Aurora converse more on these trips than they do just sitting in front of the tv or listening to an audio book. They aren’t close, by any means, but Clarke thinks Aurora starts to enjoy Clarke’s presence more

Of course, part of that could be due to Bellamy inviting Clarke to stay for family dinners after her shifts. He’ll enlist her help in the kitchen, and Octavia’s if she’s around and willing, and afterwards Clarke kicks him out of the kitchen while she cleans up so that he and Octavia can get quality time together with their mother.

“You don’t have to do this every time, you know,” he says one night, making Clarke jump. She’s almost done loading the dishwasher and she’s not sure how long Bellamy has been leaning against the doorframe but she’d definitely been humming to herself and she’s pretty sure he caught some of it.

“I don’t mind,” she says for what feels like the millionth time.

“You’ve already done more than enough for us,” he says, coming all the way into the kitchen and leaning against the counter. She tries to ignore how nice his forearms are and think about the words he’s saying. She’s found herself thinking inappropriately affectionate thoughts about him more and more recently, and she doesn’t quite know how to stop. “I don’t know what we would’ve done without you these past few months.”

“You were doing just fine on your own.”

He shakes his head.

“I was keeping it together because I had to. For mom, and also for O. But I was losing my mind, Clarke. I feel awful for even saying this when she never gets to escape her own condition, but I needed to get away from it all, even just to go to a minimum-wage job.”

“You’re not awful. You do way more for your mom than lots of people do, and even more for Octavia.” She pauses, considering her next question carefully.

“Spit it out,” he says, the corners of his mouth curling into a smile. “I’ll be nice.”

“Do you mind if I ask about the age difference between you and your sister?”

“What, like sixteen years is abnormal?” His smile grows as he dodges the dishtowel she throws at him. “Mom had me in high school. My dad never wanted any part of being a father, so she raised me on her own. Then when I was in high school she got a boyfriend and another unplanned pregnancy. He offered to marry her, but it kept getting put off. When O was about four, Mom finally broke it off with the guy. I always helped her with Octavia, even when I was away at college, so this just feels like… how could I not take care of them now? You know?”

“Plenty of people don’t do it,” Clarke repeats. “My mom and dad ended up getting divorced after he got sick. The two weren’t really related, but I always kind of resented her for it. I really admire you for sticking by your family.”

“Thanks,” he says, coughing awkwardly. “I really… admire… you too. You’re good at your job, but stuff like tonight is really above the call of duty.”

“Look how far we’ve come,” she laughs. And when she thinks back on her first few days, she has a hard time believing that they’re standing in a dimly lit kitchen, elbow to elbow, sharing secrets and life stories.

He gazes down at her, his expression unreadable, and she can see it in his eyes when he makes some kind of decision.

“Yeah,” he says, sliding closer. “That being said, I think I might need to fire you.”

“What?” She blanches.

“I’d really like to ask you out, but I have some ethical concerns about dating someone I’m employing. Namely, that it would feel unfair to make you worry that if you wanted to dump me, or even turn me down right now, your job would be in jeopardy. So if you want to keep your job and not go out with me, that’s cool and we’re really lucky to have you and I promise I won’t make this awkward again. But if there’s any chance–”

He breaks off mid-sentence when she slides her hand into his.

“Let’s see how the first date goes,” she suggests. “After that, I’m sure we can figure something out. Together.”

The Blakes’ next nurse, Jackson, is competent and easygoing, but Aurora doesn’t like him as much as she liked Clarke. Fortunately, she and Clarke still get to see plenty of each other, because neither does Bellamy.


End file.
